Finished Project!

So what do I do.... when... I am not cooking, cleaning, puppying or going to guilds?

Creating of course. Most of my creations don't start on Monday and finish in a chronological fashion. They start, get sidelined by an obligation or other deadline... like the project I am going to talk about today.

"The Night Circus" was inspired by a Facebook post made by a member of one of the Quilt Guilds I belong to and based loosely on creating this style of a patchworked elephant explored by another blogger.  About the only thing I used was the line drawing of the elephant, which I also cleaned up a bit for a better better pattern.

I wanted a really bright elephant, so I got out my box of batik scraps and started to build the body. I decided to keep the order of color symmetrical on both sides of the body although the fabrics may have changed from side to side, but color order remained.



Once the elephant was built I considered the background, plain anything was just going to be too plain... and while I was working on this I was listening to a book titled 'The Night Circus', by Erin Morgenstern. It was disappointing that the best thing about the book was the title, however the author also wrote "Water For Elephants" which is how the title of this Elephant quilt came about.... the Night Circus was about a black and white circus..... the second most interesting thing about the book, (I didn't find any other things to consider interesting in the book).







Next up was the quilting.... Of course I wanted to do this on the longarm, (for more practice). I didn't want the background quilting to be the star, so I used a swirl as the fill to add texture rather than a design since the focal point was the elephant. The elephant was nailed down with some squiggly lines across seams of the various colors, since it pretty much already stood out. 


I added her headband and some wobbly eyelashes with beads as the final bit of her costume.

A more detailed picture (as always you may click on any image for a larger view). I started this sometime around June.... but of course there were some other things between the start and the finish....











The particulars: The quilt measures 35"x35", the elephant is 17"x13"; threads were So Fine white and black (by Superior) on the background and Madeira monofil on the elephant.

So what are you working on? Has it had a sideways progression... or straight through to completion?

As always more later!! Beth
PS.... check back soon, a surprise blog contributor.... coming soon.